Arson Cafe: Thy Darkened Shade - Liber Lvcifer II: Mahapralaya Review

Saturday, January 21, 2023

Thy Darkened Shade - Liber Lvcifer II: Mahapralaya Review

We have waited too long and too patiently in the shadows for the next daring step Thy Darkened Shade would take in their full length catalog, since for the last nine years we were being occupied with sparse split contributions which were not enough to quench our thirst.

I grossly praised this band in 2014 and their album Liber Lvcifer I: Khem Sedjet, which was a follow-up to an absolutely brilliant debut and showed how these guys are among the best, if not the best black metal band of their time. And I was not wrong. Stellar musicianship and compositional dexterity are still the driving factors behind this massive, hymnic, operatic, multi-layered and complex black metal masterpiece that will not simply drop your jaw but it will smash it. Thy Darkened Shade nail it on multiple fronts with varied tempos, rich ideas all over the place, and an excellent range of vocals from harsh growls, to chanting cleans, to King Diamond tribute screams.

You will be bombarded with eclectic guitar lines, very characteristic of the band, wonderful drumming and amazing overall aesthetics. You have not heard black metal like this from any other band on the planet. Without going into the lyrical concepts of the record too much, which you can decide to explore by yourself, it is worth noting how poignant the band sounds when taking things to even more epic heights than before in an album that has the glorious stench of the effort that was put to make it, and wears it like a badge. The sound is naturally perfect, all the instruments are healthily audible and pleasant, but above all, it’s the astounding maze of compositions that leaves the biggest mark here.

Liber Lvcifer II: Mahapralaya is packed to the brim with amazing melodies, its terrifying and intimidating presence glorifies not only the band, which was foolproof from day one, but also the genre itself. The tracks are long and demand attention, but once you cross to the other side you will be recorded with one of the finest releases of this scene for the year and possibly the years to come.

DAMAGE: 4.5/5

Links:
Bandcamp || Spotify || Facebook || Instagram

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Reckoning

From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the earth rolled down. Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything.